Thousand Threads

Throughout the game, it felt like a minimalist tutorial on how to PROPERLY make an open-world game with minimal resources. It's like a checklist of "what you should do in a working open-world game." * Complex landscape level design creating the illusion of a large space – checked. * Resources scattered along the path to keep you from getting bored – checked. * Crafting and upgrade system allowing resource recycling, giving a reason to collect them – simple, but checked. * Super rare resources needed for rare crafting – checked. * Special resources that only grow in one late-game biome – checked. * Several biomes with different visual styles and landscapes – checked. * Mysterious unique structures to diversify the landscape – a few, but checked. * Collectibles to find and collect for an achievement – 2 types, checked. * Metroidvania-style mechanics opening paths to the next biome upon finding the necessary tool – 2 instances, checked. All of this isn't abundant, but it works exactly as it should. However, the truly impressive unique feature is the complex NPC behavior and relationship system. Each character has friends they care for and give gifts to, and enemies they want to s…

Walking simulator + beat things with a stick combat engine while impersonating a mailman for multiple frontier communities in a forgotten world. There’s a very light crafting system but this is not a survival game. More of a mood piece.

The game captures the quarrel, communication, and habits of different townspeople that may depicts real life scenarios. The hate, familiarity, and loving are compiled. It has simple mechanics collect different materials, complete quest, explore uncharted areas, uncover hidden artifacts, kill or help people in the game. However, the game can be repetitive in some cases, but it is worth it especially exploring different regions. Overall, the game is a good example of cozy, chaotic, and curated scenarios.

Cool little game to turn off your mind and chill in. The nice visual style and complete freedom of exploration carry a load of clunkiness, bugs, and missing QoL on their back. Best enjoyed if you don't expect anything from it and play blind. Buy on sale.

Really neat open-world stealth-action-survival delivery sandbox for interacting with AI agents in a highly systemic simulated society. If meaningful systemic interactions with NPCs is something that interests you, definitely play this. (Marketing thought: maybe call this game a 'Strand-like'?) I actually played it when it first came out, and years later am surprised to find how few reviews there are for this game! (Reviews have a direct correlation to lifetime players). I think maybe this game wasn't marketed in a way that underscored how absolutely wild its systems are (a lot of the pull quotes on it's website are about it's visuals, which: yeah it looks nice, but also color blocking is kind of just ubiquitous in the indie landscape). Basically, imagine a solo-dev made the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, but made the entire game about interacting with that systems instead of following some scripted narrative. That's this game. The dev is exploring ground very very few people are doing in the industry, and it's really a shame that this game was seemingly the end of this devs career. As a thought exercise, let's try some different marketing strategies: "In this dynamical…

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